CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE: THE SCARIEST STORIES AREN'T TOLD ON HALLOWEEN

When I was growing up in St. Louis County, everyone in the neighborhood swore Mr. Blattner's house was haunted.

It certainly looked haunted to my 8-year-old eyes: It was a sad, abandoned little bungalow with gray asbestos shingles, a sagging roof and cracked windows.

Even the two sickly maples that flanked the front yard seemed threatening, and every Halloween some wiseacre hung dummies from the trees to terrorize passing trick-or-treaters.

Mr. Blattner actually died in the house when I was about 4. Somehow, dying at home was a guarantee that you were going to come back and haunt the place.

Nobody played in front of the house while Mr. Blattner was alive because he'd come out swinging his cane and shouting. Nobody played there after he died either, because we expected his ghost to come out swinging and shouting.

On Halloween, my friends and I took the cowards' way out and avoided Mr. Blattner's house and the houses on either side of it, just in case.

Mr. Blattner really had been mean, the older kids told us. He bought candy to give out, but he knew nobody had the guts to come to his door and get it. He'd stand in the doorway, wave a bag of miniature Snickers bars and cackle at the frightened children scurrying by.

Halloween was a big deal. My friends and I planned our costumes for weeks, envisioning elaborate creations that spouted blood and trailed limbs for blocks.

No matter what I imagined, I was usually a witch or a gypsy, because my mother, poor woman, actually had to fabricate the costume about half an hour before we went out.

After we collected the goodies, we went to a friend's house and listened to their older brother or sister tell ghost stories while we ate all the candy. That way we could eat ourselves sick while we were being scared silly.

Things have changed, as things do. Mr. Blattner's house was torn down, along with the sinister twin maples, when I was in high school. Now there's a nice little ranch house with pale-blue siding on the lot.

I don't see many gypsies now that I'm giving out candy. I do see a lot of Freddie Krueger and Michael Myers wannabes. Charles Manson has long been a favorite, and I imagine O.J. Simpson, complete with too-small bloody gloves, will be big this year, along with Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.

I'd prefer to see more Ninja turtles and Barneys, personally, maybe a nice fairy princess or a ballerina or a cowboy.

Halloween started out as the night the dead would wander the Earth, roaming among the living because they hadn't made it to heaven. Evil was easily recognized in those days, clearly marked with horns, cloven hooves and big ugly fangs.

These days the demons wandering the streets on Halloween bear the same faces we've seen on the front page, on CNN.

I guess I'm getting old. Ghost stories aren't scary anymore; headlines are.

Frankly, I do get a jolt when a 10-year-old dressed as the serial killer of the month comes to my door begging candy, because it scares me that a child would choose to emulate such a person. It scares me more that the child's parents would allow it.

Maybe we're so jaded that Ted Bundy is no more diabolical than a bad actor portraying a slasher on the screen.

Maybe real-life murder victims have become as luridly comical as the screaming teen-agers slaughtered by the dozen in every chapter of "Nightmare on Elm Street."

Or maybe we've come to accept that evil doesn't need horns and hooves and fangs, that the most dangerous monsters wear human faces, not that different from our own, and walk among us and our children every day of the year.

That may be the scariest story of all.

Peggy O'Farrell is a member of the Southeast Missouirian news staff.